Sing for Science

Recorded Live at the Anime Station store in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles on July 13, 2024, rapper Denzel Curry talks with UC Irvine cultural anthropologist Dr. Mimi Ito about his relationship to anime and anime culture in Japan and abroad. We discuss Mimi’s research that tracked how manga and anime grew from just a Japanese export to a global phenomenon. Fascinatingly, anime spread through the promotion of fan groups of American ex-pats that would trade anime and create subtitles for the American audience. After decades of promo provided by this “fan subbing” and AMV (anime music video) conventions, the media industry caught on and now distributes anime across multiple platforms. Denzel does a deep dive into his favorite anime programs and traces how he was first introduced as a child in Florida and was later inspired to incorporate it into his music and fashion. Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel! 

Recorded Live inside the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston on June 10, 2024. Join Bleachers frontman and 11-time Grammy Winning super-producer Jack Antonoff for a discussion about his track “The Waiter” on which he muses about the notion that time could stop hinting at the subjectivity of time perception. On hand to talk about the implications of time from a theoretical physicist’s perspective is MIT professor Dr. David Kaiser. We talk relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, mortality, Donald Rumsfeld and more!

Pop icon SIA and psychotherapist, Dr. Alexandra Katehakis discuss attachment theory, infant brain development and sex addiction.

Recorded Live at the Museum of Science in Boston on May 8, 2024, musician polymath and Talking Heads co-founder David Byrne talks with The Book of Eels author, Patrik Svensson. Even in today’s age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them — after living for decades in freshwater — to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. Join us for an incredibly fascinating talk on biology, philosophy and more!

Recorded Live at the Totality 2024 Festival in Hannibal, NY following the Total Solar Eclipse and Laraaji’s performance of his Sun Piano/Moon Piano albums. Ambient/New Age music legend Laraaji talks about how he represents the moon’s energy in 12 musical notes, his time at Howard University in the 1960s, his experience observing the Total Solar Eclipse. Cornell University Astronomer Dr. Nikole Lewis talks about the necessary conditions to allow for a Total Solar Eclipse, extraterrestrial life, Carl Sagan and more. This event was supported by the Simons Foundation and was part of its In The Path of Totality Initiative.

Swedish Argentine folk singer José Gonzalez returns to the show along with our only other repeat guest, physicist Dr. Brian Cox of BBC and CERN fame. The two talk about secular humanism, atheism, finding meaning, black holes, Carl Sagan and more!

Recorded live at 2024 On Air Fest in Brooklyn, NY: Indian Carnatic superstar Sid Sriram talks about his song “Blue Spaces” with visual neuroscientist/color expert, Dr. Bevil Conway. We talk about Sid’s personal and cultural associations with color, cultural appropriation, the brain’s visual system, “the dress” from 2015 which some saw as blue and black and others as white and gold, the subjectivity and illusory nature of color perception and more!

Best Coast lead singer and Jungian analysand, Bethany Cosentino and “This Jungian Life Podcast" host Lisa Marchiano do a deep dive on you guessed it…Jungian Analysis! We cover dream analysis, the unconscious, creativity, archetypes, personae and then some!

Spyro Gyra co-founder Jeremy Wall talks about the height of the jazz fusion era, composing and about about the ins and outs of lake formation, spirogyra algae, harmful algal blooms or HABS and more with lake ecologist, Holly Waterfield. This episode was co-produced with the AJ Reid Science Discovery Center at SUNY Oneonta where it was taped in front of a live audience on December 6, 2023.

Queen of Percussion and Prince collaborator Sheila E talks about her 1984 hit, working with Prince, salsa music and learning from her legendary father with University of Mexico Neuroscientist, Dr. Hugo Merchant. Hugo shares fascinating findings about how the mechanisms in the brain process rhythm and help us keep a beat.